Interorganizational cooperation and our manifest destiny: An evolutionary perspective

Abstract

The largest business unit is no longer the multinational corporation but rather, cooperating networks of globally connected organizations and firms. The principal focus of this chapter is to identify trends which have come to a head in the last two decades in the world economy and have fostered interorganizational cooperation on an unprecedented scale. The technological, political, spatial and cultural complexities of global operations are becoming simply too great in many areas to be encompassed by a single company or agency. It is impossible to build a technologically complex global civilization without interorganizational cooperation, any more than a multicellular organism could survive without cooperation between its distinct but specialized constituents. The chapter reviews the evolutionary basis for cooperation, describes recent economic forces that have shaped interorganizational cooperation and describes why planetary economic cooperation is our “manifest destiny.”

Citation

Contractor, F.J. (2008), "Interorganizational cooperation and our manifest destiny: An evolutionary perspective", Boddewyn, J.J. (Ed.) International Business Scholarship: AIB Fellows on the First 50 Years and Beyond (Research in Global Strategic Management, Vol. 14), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 339-364. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1064-4857(08)00013-2